With his feature film now ‘in the can,’ Tyler Gibb has started releasing a series of ‘making of’ shorts detailing the process behind Minushi. The story takes place in a town under martial law and follows Trixi who “sets off on a journey to find the only family she’s ever known; her older brother, Griffin.” Below is the trailer for the Flash-animated film, which was 4-years in the making.

Eddie Mort and Lili Chin, the creators of one of the first Flash-animated TV series ¡Mucha Lucha!, have embarked on an independent feature. Los Campeones de la Lucha is also being animated in Flash, and the team is now churning out the animatic. Below are three clips which Eddie and Lili recently released on their blog.

storyboard drawings by Eddie Mort

Sorpresa vs Abuela Extremo from Act 3
storyboard drawings by Rafael Navarro

Meeting Rayo X from Act 1
storyboard drawings by Eddie Mort

Eddie shared a few thoughts with me this week on the making of the film.

AARON SIMPSON: What have you and Lili learned through the process of making Los Campeones?
EDDIE MORT: Los Campeones shows that you don’t necessarily have to go the traditional US broadcast way to get your ideas into production. Of course it means we work with an ‘independent movie’ size budget, but it has also allowed us to have total freedom in all aspects of the design, script and story content. The film is being financed by TV Azteca in Mexico, for their new Features division. The plan is to first release and establish the film theatrically in Mexico, with other countries to follow.

AARON: What’s your crew like?
EDDIE: It’s a skeleton! Lili Chin is taking care of designs, turnarounds, character poses, color styling, animatics, etc etc etc. I’m doing designs, storyboards, BG Layouts, animatics, script editing, voice direction, film direction, some music. The rest were freelancers - Rafael Navarro did storyboards for Act 3, Jake Bauming did storyboards for Act 2, Monkey Paw Media have been doing BG keys and Evan Newby did some additional designs. And we have DJ/Composer Phofo as Music Supervisor.

AARON: Who is animating the film?
EDDIE: We will be taking care of some of the actual animation ourselves, but using another studio for the majority of the film.

The popular Japanese TV series The Frogman Show is headed to the big screen. Created by an artist who goes by the name Frogman, this Flash-animated series has become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon in Japan, with a book, appearances in ads and fan art. Adobe, the company behind Flash, has even written about the program.

And according to Zen Tobinaka, the man behind FlaGama, Eagle Talon is coming to theaters this week. Below is the trailer.

Nina Paley, a self-professed “cynical cartoonist” turned independent animator, began working on Sita Sings the Blues in December of 2004. This week Paley unveiled her first trailer for this 72-minute film, which she has been slowly releasing in sections, chapter by chapter.

Paley is aiming to finish the film by 2008, but in the meantime, enjoy some of her other award-winning films like Stork or my personal favorite Fetch!.

Phil Nibbelink, the creator, director and “wrist” behind all 112,000 drawings in Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss, was recently awarded Best in Show and 1st Place at the Best in the Southwest Film Festival.

The Cold Hard Flash interview with Phil, which launched back in October of 2006, is one of the most popular stories in the site’s history. It’s no wonder - Nibbelink’s tale of inspiration and perseverance is just fascinating.

Congratulations, Phil!

Renegade Animation, based in Glendale, California, is loading up on feature-length projects. They’ve got two in pipe, both of which are being produced in their proprietary paperless 2D method, which was developed for their ‘Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi’ production for Cartoon Network.

First is ‘Re-animated,’ a feature-length mixture of live-action and animation. The project marks Cartoon Network’s much discussed foray into original live-action work. ‘Re-animated’ is “about a 12-year-old boy whose life is turned upside down after an accident at an amusement park.” The film features voice work by Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee Herman) and Tom Kenny, who voices Spongebob.

Second is ‘Christmas is Here Again,’ which was formerly named ‘Who Stole Santa’s Sack?’ According to an article at Digitalproducer.com, the 9-month long project is currently in post production. Kathy Bates and Ed Asner provide voices, and Jay Leno delivers the voice over. In the same article, Ashley Postlewaite, Executive Producer at Renegade, offers the perfect quote:

“By applying our traditional training and employing the latest animation tools, we have streamlined animation process and made it more affordable… We believe it is the future of 2D animation.”

Many, including myself, think you’re dead-on, Ashley.

In a way, William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is about going it alone. As most of us know, the story follows two star-crossed lovers who decide to follow their passion, despite having no support from the embattled establishment (their families). This is also Phil Nibbelink’s tale - one of a ex-Disney man, who follows his dream of making animated feature films. In early 2003, with no help from the studio system, he summoned up his strength, chose a software and set off to make his vision come alive.

The result of Phil’s work, a 4 1/2 year journey, is a 77-minute Flash-animated feature film - ‘Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss.’ He drew the entire feature himself, all 112,000 frames of it, on a Wacom tablet, right into Flash. But he didn’t stop drawing there - last weekend he sat in the lobbies of two cinemas and drew Romeo & Juliet sketches for 600 children. And now, as his 5-year journey comes to a close, Phil will watch his feature film receive a theatrical release, beginning on October 27th throughout the Los Angeles area. It’s a remarkable story of individual achievement, and one that I know will have a better ending than Shakespeare’s classic version.

Have a look at the trailer, and then below Phil answers a few questions for CHF.

AARON SIMPSON: Was ‘Romeo & Juliet’ your sole project through these last 5 years?
PHIL: ‘Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss’ was the only thing I’ve worked on for the last 5 years. I worked around the clock 24/7 trying to finish before my savings ran out. But I have 4 small children who needed to be played with so I used them as my test audience and we’d have daily focus groups to discuss story points and whether or not gags were working.

AARON: At any point during the production, did the end seem out of reach?
PHIL: In order to reach my goal, I had to make 100 drawings, 5 seconds of film or complete 2 shots a day. As long as I hit one of those marks everyday I knew I was on schedule. And I wouldn’t go to bed until I had.

AARON: In the beginning, what was the common reaction when you explained what you were setting out to do?
PHIL: Well, everybody thought that I was a ‘mad man!’ They probably still do. But I worked for so long in the big studio environment that I just got sick and tired of the merry-go-round. So much money and time is wasted going in circles and having endless meetings and making useless changes. I kept saying to myself, “this would go faster if I just did it myself.” And it did - I proved it!

AARON: Did you develop any repetitive motion disorders on your way to completing 112,000 drawings?
PHIL: I had to wrap a kneaded erasure around the Wacom stylus to prevent callouses forming on my fingers. When we had to go somewhere, my wife drove and I did ink and paint in the car on a laptop with a graphics tablet. That bought me more time and relieved any repetitive motion disorder.

AARON: Was there much edited out in this final cut?
PHIL: No. I had a real clear vision of the movie. Working alone allowed me the luxury of starting at the beginning of the film and animating straight ahead. I could watch the movie from the start right up to where I just finished and it was very clear then what had to be animated next.

AARON: Had you worked with Flash prior to ‘Romeo & Juliet?’
PHIL: I hadn’t worked with Flash before. Prior to ‘Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss,’ I animated two movies on my own - ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘Lief Ericson: The Boy Who Discovered America.’ Those films were animated on an Amiga using Deluxe paint at video resolution. I thought if I could get my work on 35mm I could reach a wider audience. So I explored a lot of options. I concluded that drawing on paper would add the extra steps of inking and painting or scanning. As a one-man-band, I had to look for ways to cut steps out of the process. I looked at all the animation software and concluded that 2K files don’t play back in real time on small cheap computers. So I had to go vector.

I bought a film recorder from Upgrade Technologies because I figured it was cheaper to shoot it myself than pay a service. I shot a 2K test at 2048×1234x24bit BMP’s with Flash, and nervously projected it up on the big screen. I was blown away with the perfect line quality, no jaggies, no rastering, no banding in the gradients - just perfect flat colors and sub-pixel antialiasing in the slow camera moves. OK, maybe the super slow rotations staggered a bit, but that was something I could see happen in real-time on the computer and I could easily correct it. So Flash 4 was it and I hit the ground running and never looked back.

AARON: Is that the version you used throughout the production?
PHIL: I used Flash 4 the whole production.

AARON: Did you rely on much re-use in your Flash scenes?
PHIL: When I tried to migrate to Flash 5 it created forward-compatibility problems. Being a one-man-band, I have to cut a lot of corners. And re-using animation is a huge time saver. So an animation created in Flash 5 couldn’t be opened in Flash 4 without a fight. Yes, there are cut and paste work arounds using Flash 4 and Flash 5 launched at the same time but that created RAM issues and crashes. So screw it! I just stuck with Flash 4. And besides, I couldn’t afford the upgrades and they really weren’t adding more art tools.

AARON: What feature is most lacking in Flash that would have helped your production?
PHIL: Defocusing, invertible masks, and that irritating pop from bitmap line to vector line would have helped.

AARON: What type of scene did you turn to Moho for?
PHIL: The slowest thing in production was inbetweening. Moho, now called Anime 4, allows you to take an Illustrator file from Flash and rig it with bones to create very organic squash and stretch movement. This was perfect for the “over-the-shoulder” or the “listening” characters, or keeping crowd scene characters alive. Then I could export a SWF vector animation that imports into Flash. With experience I found I could create hybrid animation. I would hand-animate a character in Flash moving wildly into a pose and then animate the moving hold with Moho. With very little effort I could make seamless transitions from one to the other and get through the shot a lot faster.

When it came time to sell ‘Romeo & Juliet,’ I was told by distributors that there “wasn’t enough 3D in the movie” and that “2D is dead.” So I’m hoping to prove that there is still a family audience out there that loves fully-animated, hand-drawn films.

Read more from Phil in the Cold Hard Flash message boards.